A few impressions of my visit to the ICC meetings last week, and in particular of the conferences.
1°) ‘2.0’ is catching on. More than just a fad, so-called ‘2.0’ tools are knocking at our door. Between the ‘pure 2.0s’ and the traditional players like IBM Lotus and Microsoft who are getting in on the act, we’re well beyond the point of a major trend. There’s no doubt that these tools will take their place in the enterprise in the years to come. It remains to be seen how and, above all, for what purpose.
2°) An evolution in the way we understand (and grasp) information: today we store it, tomorrow (and already today for those who are thinking ahead) we mobilise it and bring it to life. The corollary of this is the notion of PKM (personal knowledge management): each individual is responsible for making the best use of his or her information, and it is the sum of all individual uses that adds value to the collective use.
3°) The individual and the group: among the many interesting things presented by Sylvie Le Bars during her talk (which I hope was filmed so that it can be put on line later…) was the notion of the individual within the group. This is something I really believe in and it’s a challenge for many managers: to make the group succeed by making each individual succeed. This has been a constant in many of our talks: to work together, the individual must have a personal interest. All that remains is to ensure that the pursuit of this interest also helps the group. The subject is vast enough to warrant more than a few lines.
4°) The duality between collaborating with and collaborating on. What should be the central element of collaboration? The person producing the information or the information produced? Some people see the answer to this question as marking the boundary between 1.0 and 2.0. I’m far from having such a clear-cut opinion on the question, because document sharing is also part of the 2.0 movement, it all depends on why and how. In any case, both are necessary, each with its own purpose. You can’t structure a company without documents or processes, you can’t innovate or be reactive without taking into account information… informally. There is much to be said and refined here too.
5°) Put information back at the heart of the company: according to IBM, in 2010, half the ideas for new products or services will come from outside the company. These are all flows that need to be captured externally and transformed internally. In the same way, I’ve often heard that information is discarded at the company’s periphery. These examples give us a good idea of the dual reality of information that I mentioned earlier: structuring information on the one hand, located at the heart of the company, and non-formalised (rather than informal) information that enables agility and innovation, that can be used in its raw state but also needs to be confronted with other ideas to mature, and which, because it escapes traditional workflows, is difficult for companies to use and utilise.
Interesting lines of thought that tend to intersect: documents and processes vs. people and ideas? 1.0 vs. 2.0? The boundaries are more subtle than that (and I don’t think it’s an ‘either/or’ situation, it’s an ‘and’ that’s needed here), but the fact remains that the awareness that there is relevant information that is not being captured and used by the company on the one hand, and that new web technologies are going to change both our perception of the network and our uses of it on the other, is increasingly present in people’s minds and is raising real expectations.
